Chicago’s Former Top Lawyer Joins Local Law Firm as Partner

The City of Chicago’s former corporation counsel Mark Flessner has joined Chicago-based law firm Schoenberg Finkel Beederman Bell Glazer as a partner.

Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot asked Flessner to resign from his position as Chicago’s top lawyer in December after the city faced backlash over an attempt to prevent body camera footage from a botched 2019 police raid from being aired on a local news station.

The footage obtained by CBS Chicago shows police entering Anjanette Young’s apartment in February 2019, where they handcuffed her while she was naked. Police only later realized they had incorrect information about the apartment’s occupants, according to a 2019 complaint filed by Young’s lawyers in Illinois district court.

Flessner told Bloomberg Law when he left the city government that he and his team filed a motion to block publication of the footage because he said it would violate a previously court-ordered confidentiality agreement.

Northern District of Illinois Judge John J. Tharp, Jr., confirmed in January that publishing the body camera footage did violate his confidentiality order, but he did not take any disciplinary action against the lawyer who supplied the videos to CBS Chicago.

Flessner, who did not immediately respond to request for comment on his new position, started officially at SFBBG on Monday.

“I look forward to joining SFBBG and its litigation team and getting back into private practice,” Flessner said in a Monday statement from the firm, which focuses on representing businesses.

Before his tenure as Chicago’s corporation counsel, where he was in charge of a department of 400, Flessner was a partner with Holland & Knight and Altheimer & Gray. He was also assistant United States attorney with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for nearly 13 years.

Since Flessner’s resignation, Lightfoot’s former counsel and senior ethics advisor Celia Meza has held the role of acting corporation counsel. Lightfoot also called on a retired judge, Ann Claire Williams, now of counsel at Jones Day, to lead an investigation into the botched raid and the city’s related policies and practices.